Monday, March 13, 2017

Teaching the Hungry to Fish

Many good people in America are
willing to share what they have with others who are less fortunate
than they. A very large number of nonprofits work to make life
easier for persons in Africa and Asia as well as in South America.
Others are trying to help out undocumented immigrants in the US whose
persecution is even more violent today than under the previous
president. There are many projects to save children—often children
of color or Native American-- that are at risk of ending up as
addicts or as prisoners.

The many millions of people who
support these different nonprofits, often challenging and ingenious
projects, deserve great praise for their dedication to the well-being
of everyone on this globe.

It is a favorite cliché among
members and supporters of nonprofits that it is better to teach
people how to fish than to give them fish to eat. The handy sayings
suggests that rather than giving suffering people direct support, we
should enable them to improve their own situation by overcoming the
causes of their suffering. But they must know them if they are to
remove the causes of their suffering,. (They often do.) And so must
we if we are going to help them.

While talk about teaching people how
to fish is popular, few people who are generous in their support of
people suffering around the globe are interested in the causes of
that suffering. The reason for that is clear. The United States, as
the most powerful country in the world, is involved in the condition
of almost all people in the world and frequently contributes to their
misery.

Recent newspaper stories report
hundreds of Libyans drowning in their panicked flight from their
country. A few years ago they were ruled by a bloodthirsty dictator.
We decided to unseat him with a harsh bombing campaign. Now they have
several governments; parts of the country are controlled but not
really governed by militias. The standard of living is deplorable.
The number of civilians killed is rising. The flights and the
drownings are in part the result of our intervening in their country.
The United States is complicit in the misery of Libya.

The same is true in Syria where we
have meddled in situations we did not understand. We have supported
different oppositional groups, not having learned our lesson in Libya
that overthrowing a bloodthirsty dictator rarely improves the lives
of the people. We have contributed to an unbelievably destructive
Civil War and to the hundreds of thousands of refugees all over
Europe. We had taken in about 10,000 of those by the time Pres. Trump
closed our borders to all of them. He does not understand about
complicity or taking responsibility.

Our government has always believed
that one of its major foreign policy objectives should be to ease the
entry of American corporations into foreign countries. For instance
through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) we have
opened Mexico to importation of American corn, subsidized by the US
government, and produced on huge farms more cheaply than Mexican
farmers could produce their corn. We put small Mexican farmers out of
business and they moved to the city where life was really harsh. They
came to the US, undocumented, to earn some money for their families.

Our government accuses them of
breaking our immigration laws and sends them back. They don’t ask
why these immigrants are trying to find their way through the hot
desert, leaving their families behind. Why would anybody do that?

Washington has always supported big
business, right-wing interests and authoritarian governments in Latin
America. For the common people there was no hope and so they joined
the long, hard and dangerous road to North America only to find as
did many previous generations of immigrants that our streets are not
paved with gold. (They only have a lot of potholes.)

Many children in communities of
color exist under very difficult conditions. We tend to blame the
black family structure or other mythologies. We – white people –
do not look at ourselves in the mirror and see the people who keep
perpetuating racial injustice and oppression and who are therefore
complicit in the hard lives of many children. In similar ways
we—white people-- are responsible for the problems of children in
Native American families.

We cannot remove the causes of
misery around the world and in our own cities and rural areas without
taking responsibility for the damage we do to people in many
different places and working hard to end our destructive policies.
Giving aid, being generous in giving fish to hungry people is not
good enough. We need to be aware of the damage we have done for
centuries, are still doing and stop doing it.